Suicide Bombing Kills 6, Wounds Dozens In Northwest Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan ? A suicide bomber targeting a police van killed six people in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, including the son and nephew of an Afghan official involved in peace negotiations with the Taliban, officials said.

The bomber, who was riding a motorcycle, detonated his explosives as the police patrol drove by in the northwestern city of Peshawar, said city police chief Liaqat Ali Khan.

The two Afghans who were killed ? Qazi Mohammad Hilal Waqad and Mohammad Idrees ? were working at their country's consulate in Peshawar where the attack occurred, said Afghan Consul General Syed Mohammad Ibrahim Khel in Islamabad.

However, it did not appear they were the target of the attack, Khel said.

Waqad's father, Qazi Amin Waqad, is a member of the Afghan High Peace Council, a group appointed by the Afghan government to hold peace negotiations with the Taliban, said an official at the consulate in Peshawar, Shakir Qarar.

The peace council member was in Afghanistan when the attack occurred, while Waqad and Idrees were driving to work when the bomber struck, Qarar added.

Three policemen were among over 30 people who were wounded by the blast, said the police chief, Khan. Many of the dead and wounded were from a nearby passenger bus, which bore the brunt of the attack.

Local TV footage showed the wreckage of the bus and the motorcycle, as rescue workers rushed wounded people to hospitals in the city.

No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion will likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban. The group has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for years and has stepped up attacks ahead of next month's parliamentary election.

On Sunday, the Taliban killed 11 people in bomb attacks on a political rally and two campaign offices in the northwest, part of their quest to disrupt the election. The group has killed at least 60 people in attacks on politicians and party workers since the beginning of April.

The Taliban have specifically targeted more secular political parties that have supported military offensives against the militants in the northwest. The Taliban have largely spared Islamic parties and others who believe the government should strike a peace deal with the militants, rather than fight them.

There is a concern that the violence could benefit the parties that take a softer line toward the militants because they are able to campaign more freely ahead of the May 11 election.

"Unless the government, the country's independent election commission and security forces ensure that all parties can campaign freely without fear, the election may be severely compromised," Ali Dayan Hasan, the head of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan, said in a statement issued Monday.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/pakistan-suicide-bombing-peshawar_n_3176388.html

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Algeria president sent to Paris after mini-stroke

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) ? Algeria's state news agency says the president has been transferred to Paris for medical treatment following a mini-stroke.

The report published early Sunday said that though the brief blockage of a blood vessel known as transient ischemic attack had "no complications," according to authorities, Abdelaziz Bouteflika's doctors had recommended additional tests.

French and Algerian media say the 76-year-old president had been checked into Val de Grace hospital, where he was treated in 2005 for a bleeding ulcer.

There have long been concerns about Bouteflika's health, especially since the president rarely appears in public.

Bouteflika, president since 1999, is credited with seeing Algeria through the end of a bloody civil war against Islamists and ruling in an uneasy partnership with the powerful military.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/algeria-president-sent-paris-mini-stroke-081408904.html

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my teen daughter's drug supplier - Talk About Marriage

Today, 05:33 AM ? #5 (permalink)

Forum Supporter

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Join Date: Dec 2010

Posts: 4,672

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You'll be wasting your time trying to incriminate the dealers as if your daughter wants MJ chances are she'll find another dealer really quickly even if the one you reported got raided.

MJ is a socially acceptable drug that ALOT of people smoke in their leisure time, which is also why it's very easy to find replacement dealers, and also why it can be hard to quit. In parties, in gatherings, there's always going to be the temptation.

Even if your daughter goes through this program, there's nothing really stopping her from having a smoke once she goes out. But MJ is mild, I would be more worried if she went on heavier drugs. Hence I recommend education, encouragement, and support for your daughter rather than trying to make MJ usage forbidden/getting her in trouble for it. She has to learn personal responsibility, that's the only real defence that one has in the face of drugs.

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Source: http://talkaboutmarriage.com/family-parenting-forums/72351-my-teen-daughters-drug-supplier.html

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Life360, A Family Networking App With More Users Than Foursquare, Is Now Headed For Cars, Smart Home Systems

Foursquare recently announced it has grown to 33 million users, but another, albeit older, location-based app called Life360 just crossed a milestone of its own: 34 million users. Yes, this family locator utility is now bigger than Foursquare - at least in terms of registered users. To be fair, the companies don't disclose their actives.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/HQV7kPIbiuc/

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Embraer earnings down on falling regional jet production

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA will likely report slightly weaker earnings on Monday as rising labor costs and slower production of its commercial jets underscored ongoing challenges, despite recent government support.

Embraer is expected to post an 11 percent decline in first-quarter earnings from a year ago to $58 million, according to the average estimate of five analysts in a Reuters survey.

Deliveries of Embraer regional jets that seat less than 120 passengers, its biggest source of revenue, fell in the quarter to the lowest in at least five years after poor demand withered its order backlog.

Slowing assembly lines and uncertainty about upcoming orders have led to sharp swings in Embraer's stock price, which touched a five-year high this month, bolstered by hopes of new demand from major U.S. airlines.

The day-to-day volatility of Sao-Paulo listed shares rose in the past two weeks to the highest in a year and a half.

Embraer's earnings have benefited from tax breaks and a weaker local currency - two results of government policy supporting manufacturers and exporters - but the cost of production in Brazil continues to weigh on profitability.

A collective bargaining agreement signed in December pushed up payroll costs by at least 6 percent in the quarter, according to Bradesco analysts led by Edigimar Maximiliano Jr.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a gauge of operating profit known as EBITDA, is expected to fall 9 percent from a year earlier to $135 million.

Several analysts forecast improving earnings over the course of the year, as deliveries recover from the seasonal weakness of the first quarter.

(Reporting by Brad Haynes and Roberta Vilas Boas. Editing by Andre Grenon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/embraer-earnings-down-falling-regional-jet-production-181107551.html

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Israeli military shoots down drone

JERUSALEM (AP) ? Israel shot down a drone Thursday as it approached the country's northern coast, the military said. Suspicion immediately fell on the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon which denied it sent the craft.

Hezbollah's Al Manar TV made the announcement Thursday through a one line statement flashed as an urgent news bar on its screen.

Despite the denial, the incident was likely to raise already heightened tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, a bitter enemy that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said he was in a helicopter in northern Israel at the time of the incident, said he viewed the infiltration attempt with "utmost gravity."

Officials said Netanyahu was informed of the unfolding incident as he was flying north for a cultural event with members of the country's Druse minority. They said his helicopter briefly landed while the drone was intercepted before Netanyahu continued on his way.

"On my way here in the helicopter, I was told that there is an infiltration attempt of a drone inside the skies of Israel," he said in the northern Arab-Israeli town of Daliyat al-Karmel. "We will continue to do everything necessary to safeguard the security of Israel's citizens."

Lebanon's state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli warplanes flew over the Christian town of Jezzine and the highlands of the Iqlim al-Tuffah province, a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Lebanon, Thursday morning.

The Lebanese army also reported Israeli jets violated Lebanese air space on Tuesday and Wednesday. Israel has stepped up its flights over Lebanon amid fears that Hezbollah is taking advantage of the chaos caused by the Syrian civil war.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said the unmanned aircraft was detected as it was flying over Lebanon and tracked as it approached Israeli airspace.

Lerner said the military waited for the aircraft to enter Israeli airspace, confirmed it was "enemy," and then an F-16 warplane shot it down.

The drone was flying at an altitude of about 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) and was downed roughly five miles (eight kilometers) off the Israeli coast near the northern city of Haifa. Lerner said Israeli naval forces were searching for the remains of the aircraft.

He said it still was not clear who sent the drone, noting it flew over Lebanese airspace, but that it could have originated from somewhere else.

Other military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to talk to the media, said they believed it was an Iranian-manufactured aircraft sent by Hezbollah. The Lebanese group sent a drone into Israeli airspace last October that Israel also shot down.

Netanyahu repeatedly has warned that Hezbollah might try to take advantage of the instability in neighboring Syria, a key Hezbollah ally, to obtain what he calls game-changing weapons.

Israel has all but confirmed that it carried out an airstrike in Syria early this year that destroyed a shipment of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles bound for Hezbollah.

A senior Lebanese security official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said Lebanon had no information on Thursday's incident.

Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi also said he had no information, adding the group would put out a statement if it had something to say on the issue.

When Israeli military shot down a Hezbollah drone on Oct. 6, it took days for Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to confirm it in a speech. He warned at the time that it would not be the last such operation by the group. He said the sophisticated aircraft was made in Iran and assembled by Hezbollah.

___

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in Beirut and Diaa Hadid in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-military-shoots-down-drone-142037543.html

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Cost-effectiveness of helicopter transport of trauma victims examined

Apr. 25, 2013 ? Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have for the first time determined how often emergency medical helicopters need to help save the lives of seriously injured people to be considered cost-effective compared with ground ambulances.

The researchers found that if an additional 1.6 percent of seriously injured patients survive after being transported by helicopter from the scene of injury to a level-1 or level-2 trauma center, then such transport should be considered cost-effective. In other words, if 90 percent of seriously injured trauma victims survive with the help of ground transport, 91.6 need to survive with the help of helicopter transport for it to be considered cost-effective.

The study, published online this month in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, does not address whether most helicopter transport actually meets the additional 1.6 percent survivorship threshold.

"What we aimed to do is reduce the uncertainty about the factors that drive the cost-effective use of this important critical care resource," said the study's lead author, M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an instructor in the Division of Emergency Medicine. "The goal is to continue to save the lives of those who need air transport, but spare flight personnel the additional risks of flying -- and patients with minor injuries the additional cost -- when helicopter transport is not likely to be cost-effective." (Helicopter medical services generally bill patients' insurance providers directly, but patients may have to pay some of the bill out of pocket, or, if they're uninsured, possibly all of it.)

The study comes at a time when finding ways to cut medical costs has become a national priority, and the overuse of helicopter transport has come under scrutiny. Previous studies have shown that, on average, over half of patients transported by helicopter have only minor, non-life threatening injuries. For these patients, transport by helicopter instead of ground ambulance is not likely to make a difference in outcomes, and the additional risk and cost of helicopter transport outweighs the benefit, Delgado said.

In 2010, there were an estimated 44,700 U.S. helicopter transports from injury scenes to level-1 and level-2 trauma centers, with an average cost of about $6,500 per transport. The total annual cost is around $290 million. (Level-1 and -2 trauma centers are hospitals equipped and staffed to provide the highest levels of surgical care to trauma patients; level-1 centers offer a broader array of readily available specialty care, and also are committed to research and teaching efforts.)

Yet emergency helicopter transport sits in a cost-efficiency conundrum: It is most needed in remote, rural areas where transport by ground can take far longer than by air. These areas also tend to have sparser populations and therefore fewer calls for aid, making it difficult to recoup the overhead costs of maintaining helicopter services, Delgado said.

In some areas of the country, however, helicopters are automatically launched based on the 911 call. "Once ground responders and the helicopter arrive, sometimes they may find patients who are awake, talking and have stable vital signs," Delgado said. "The challenge is getting helicopters to patients who need them in a rapid fashion so the flight team can intervene and make a difference, but also know based on certain criteria who isn't sick enough to require air transport."

Most health economists consider medical interventions that yield a year of healthy life -- a measure known as a quality-adjusted life-year -- at a cost of between $50,000 and $100,000 to be cost-effective in high-income countries, such as the United States, Delgado said. If society is willing to pay as much as $100,000 toward helicopter transport for each QALY gained by the seriously injured patients, then helicopter transport needs to reduce the mortality rate of these patients by a modest 1.6 percent compared with ground transport to meet this threshold, the study says. Or it needs to improve long-term disability outcomes, the study says.

"If future studies find helicopter transport leads to improved long-term quality of life and disability outcomes, then helicopter transport would be considered cost-effective, even if no additional lives were saved," Delgado said. "Only a handful of studies have examined outcomes other than death, without definitive results."

For severely injured patients, helicopter evacuation to a trauma center is preferable if it is faster than ground transport. However, helicopter transport is more expensive and poses rare, but often fatal, safety risks -- specifically, the risk of crashing. Plus, it is often difficult for emergency responders to discern which patients would actually benefit from being flown in a helicopter rather than driven in an ambulance to a high-level trauma center. Until this study, the survival benefit needed to offset these potential drawbacks hasn't been clear.

"More accurately determining which patients have serious injuries and need to be flown is the most promising way to ensure you are getting a good value by using helicopter transport," Delgado said. "To do this, we should promote diligent use of the Centers for Disease Control's field triage guidelines among EMS responders. This would help ensure that injured victims who are transported by helicopter to a trauma center actually require trauma care. Secondly, we need to figure out whether the practice of autolaunching helicopters based on a 911 call makes sense. If the benefit of the faster response time outweighs the expenditure of resources on those patients who may not actually need helicopter transport, then autolaunching makes sense. If not, the practice should be reconsidered."

There is mixed evidence in the literature about the degree to which helicopter transport reduces mortality. It is therefore uncertain whether the routine use of helicopter transport is cost-effective for most patients in the United States when ground transport is also feasible. The study found that the cost-effectiveness also depends on regional variation in the costs of air and ground transport and the percentage of patients who are flown that have minor injuries.

"Of course, this study only applies to situations in which both ground and helicopter transport to a trauma center are feasible," Delgado added. "In situations where the only alternative is being taken by ground to a local nontrauma-center hospital or being flown to a trauma center, then clearly we want any patient with a suspicion of a serious injury flown to that trauma center."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. M. Kit Delgado, Kristan L. Staudenmayer, N. Ewen Wang, David A. Spain, Sharada Weir, Douglas K. Owens, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert. Cost-Effectiveness of Helicopter Versus Ground Emergency Medical Services for Trauma Scene Transport in the United States. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.annemergmed.2013.02.025

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/RUBDo2zsyzY/130425164502.htm

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